The Atchafalaya Basin consists of the West Atchafalaya Floodway, the Morganza Floodway, and the Lower Atchafalaya Basin Floodway, which together are designed to move floodwaters south to the Gulf of Mexico. Before the Mississippi River Flood of 1927, the basin had served an increasing role as a distributary outlet of the Mississippi River during seasonal flooding, and after the Flood Control Act of 1928 it became a distributary floodway system of the lower Mississippi River under the authority of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for flood control. The basin’s 833,000-acre floodway begins at the Old River Control Complex just northeast of Simmesport and runs between the Atchafalaya Basin levees to the Gulf of Mexico, while interconnected waterways, bayous, and swamps create a network that drains the Atchafalaya, Red, and Mississippi rivers. Within the West Atchafalaya Floodway, Indian Bayou is 28,500 acres of federal land that receives periodic backwater flooding from the Atchafalaya River and excess rainwater through the Courtableau water-control structure north of Indian Bayou. This area includes swamps, bottomland hardwoods, restored agricultural areas, and water features such as Bayou Fordouche, Bayou Fusilier, the north flats of Henderson Lake, and Lake Bigeaux. Indian Bayou was historically important in Louisiana long before the floodway system was created: the Opelousas Tribe first populated the area, the French and then the Spanish later colonized it, immigrants from St. Domingue arrived during the slave revolution there, several Civil War skirmishes took place nearby, and Opelousas served as the state capital for nine months after the fall of Baton Rouge in 1862. Today Indian Bayou is open to the public for fishing, hunting, birding, paddling, hiking, biking, horseback riding, and all-terrain vehicle trails.